The rebellion against the return to the office is getting serious
wsj.com
wsj.com
I believe many of the folks vehemently against the return to office are ignoring this detail. At my last company, I left because leadership refused to recognize that not all teams are the same. We didn’t want to manage people when they’re not delivering. Some organizations were working people to death while other orgs and teams became a form of corporate welfare. Imagine not showing up to any meetings, making no progress on your Kanban board, etc etc.
Either you have management find some way to motivate them, directly let them go, or force them to come in until they demonstrate they can work from home.
Ignoring the problem or pretending it doesn’t exist, or worse, making up for it by offloading even more work to your high performers is all wrong.
I saw managers who refused to do anything because it meant they’d effectively lose half or more of their people. Meanwhile, other orgs were unsustainable engineer burnout factories.
I can parlay that energy into the product I’m building on the days I don’t commute and I feel like I achieve more.
Certainly the remote first culture will require more from managers so I get where the push to return is coming from, but that’s something we can deal with together as teams.
Managers shouldn't be babysitters.
Con: It's difficult to fire people in the UK
Short version: it's not difficult to fire anyone, all that changes across countries is how much it costs.
[0] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
How times have changed.
I am not sure how much you have been in leadership positions or dealt with hiring in tech, but things aren't as simple as letting people go. For one, a lot of people with performance issues know they have performance issues and want to be better - so if they have trouble concentrating/dealing with the temptation to slack at home, establishing formal work-from-office policies could actually help them. Basically, it's almost always better to try to coach underperforming people or create/find an environment that works for them rather than just let them go (especially for software where it's hard to find people already, it's a bad look to fire someone in under X months, and where as a line manager you actually have little discretion over firing people).
Also, once a culture of not delivering gets entrenched, letting people go gets hard. You don't want to let go of 4 out of 6 members of a team at once, even if they aren't doing anything. It's a bad look for the entire management chain and makes other employees scared. Investors may interpret it as a sign of trouble with financials.
I don't think there's anything wrong with requiring underperforming employees to work out of an office, as long as their job wasn't advertised as fully remote and the employer never formally told them they were not expected to return the office. I do agree that people who are doing a good job working remotely have every right to continue working remotely though. I just also agree with the GP that remote work enables slackers and can make getting shit done hard/frustrating.
It takes an extremely brilliant remote worker to add as much value to a collaboration as an average-skilled worker who is in the room. Most people aren't that brilliant.
If everyone else is working to fill in their full hours even if they finish ahead of schedule, it seems unfair that one person who finishes early then just puts their feet up.
The opposite is true of course, some tasks naturally take longer than expected and you borrow time from the tasks you finished early
So you rather they pretend to work or drag their feet getting work done? That's usually what happens when managers think this way because there is no incentive to finish faster. In fact, I remember there was a term for it: Sandbagging. That's the type of behavior you are incentivizing.
- Slackers are a pretty big % of corpo workforce. They are not as useless in the office.
- You cannot pressure hard-workers to do even more and more on remote.
So the balance is broken. Slackers do fkall and hardworkers do only whats needed.
If you fire slackers -> hiring process costs a lot and you have no guarantee you get a hardworker. So for employer its a lose-lose situation.
The other comment explains in more details why firing is hard.
Output didn’t drop but productivity did.
Maybe that’s true in some places, but in the majority of places people can choose how long they want their commute to be. It’s usually a trade off between having a big house, a short commute, and saving money.
But yeah, I probably have to talk to my supervisor about it.
Management must set timelines here or employees will maximize the time they can get away with. That is the exact same optimization we try to achieve in any other business process. Spend your budget or it will be cut.
Sure, intrinsic motivation exists in some teams but that can be highly dependent on the task. I have ones that I like and those that I don't. I won't hide the fact that the tasks I like might get done quicker. Shouldn't be that way perhaps but people aren't robots.
But still, the problem is the same if people are at home or at work. I personally didn't even like working from home but my office is just 10 minutes from where I live. Not true for most employees though.
Over the 18 months of lockdown, his weekly engineering updates showed little change from week to week.
No surprise that when the order to return to the office came in, he argued for months about it
Do you feel it was because they were held to a higher standard by managers etc. or ended up being motivated to do more because of camaraderie of irl interactions or something else?
If say you choose to work from home and then you find out your coworkers working in office get more wage increase or promotion than you do, would you be OK with it?
“Not going into the office” != “never seeing coworkers face to face.” Being remote has forced our team to be more proactive about seeing one another and so we’ve ended up socializing more than we ever did at the office. It’s easy to fall into the trap of not doing anything other than working chat and water cooler conversations and never actually socializing because “we see each other every day.”
Also, they can always link the difference to race/gender etc. Say, if there are more women or racial minorities chose option A, and then option A leads to less wage increases, then the company will be in trouble.
Any other solution?
I am bothered a lot by people at home. I’ve been remote pre-pandemic so the affliction of people thinking your being at home means you can run their errands is not new. The pandemic made it worse because now I am bothered all day every work day.
You’d think, “stop bothering the person paying the mortgage” would be a motivator but it’s simply not the case for me.
I know many people in this position so it is worthwhile to have empathy for people who really need an office.
And of course to reiterate, that doesn’t mean that a return to office should be mandatory.
It takes diligence, patience, soundproofing, and sometimes locks and a detached shed / workshop.
Almost every decision (which requires a meeting) requires someone from this diaspora. So we are on video no matter what.
Let's do a bit of math:
- if you are NOT full remote but also NOT full in office you need to pay both an infra for remote workers and offices;
- or you give double gears of you made some workers really unhappy moving their gears back&forth (remember you can easily move laptops BUT normally you do not move docking for them with external monitor and keyboard and mice for working in comfort;
- since potentially ALL workers can came back you can't save money for a smaller office neither...
Are such hybrid employers smart?
Oh, on the other side it's the same:
- why coming back to the office, so live nearby the office instead in more affordable and nicer places if you WFH more or less frequently and potentially you can WFH 100%?
- why having a home with a workspace if you work from the office more or less frequently?
Hybrid is HORRIBLE and should be there only for a very limited transitory period of time to let anyone change habits, definitively not something smart.
Or for the employer the joy of sharing some loans to find some others do not pay and he have to pay on their behalf than loose time in Court hoping there is something to recover?
My employer is reopening as a “hybrid” workplace this week but teams also have the freedom to choose their own approach (including staying remote) for now. Some people are thrilled to get back in, others (like me!) are remaining remote with some mild hand wringing about how long we’ll be allowed to do so.
As a parent of young children (who can’t get vaccinated yet) the pandemic has been quite trying for us but the switch to remote has been insanely good for my mental and physical health.
I have filled the two hours a day I used to spend commuting with things like running, biking, strength training, reading, more time with my kids, etc. and this has led to improved fitness and diet, more energy, better sleep, _and_ increased output at work.
At this point I just can’t even imagine going back to having a commute.
If you are experienced then WFH is easy to do, but for new people being in person makes it much easier to learn a complex business/code environment like we had. I could draw on a white board our crazy world much easier than try to explain it online.
Also the insistence by some people for cameras in zoom calls drove me nuts, I hate cameras so I never turned mine on (also my bandwidth was never great so video often made the audio fall out, a good excuse).
Its also quite insane to spend 1-2 hours of commute per day back and forth to and from the office. Commute time is mostly waste.
* Astronomical gas prices, means commuting by car is a financial disaster
* Rise of domestic terrorism and gun violence, means offices, public spaces, or public transport no longer feel safe
* Most offices aren't equipped with a bidet or shower
They are statistically as safe or safer than they've ever been, but the drama-driven "news" reporting today would love to have you believe otherwise, so that you tune in every day to learn about everything you're supposed to be afraid of.
It's even more hilarious that they think being in the office is much different. I used to have video calls with people on other floors of the building because we couldn't be bothered to walk up the stairs.
No forced commute, no stress positions in crap office furniture and the resulting daily back pain, no forced cheap hardware, no forced interruptions and conversations I have to compensate with longer work hours, no forced socialization with people I’d never choose to socialize with, no crap $20 lunches paying for the insane rents of the food places instead for quality products.
Please, do go back to the office yourself but don’t force others.
Having 10+ hours of additional personal time per week, working on much better hardware while playing my favorite music, eating quality food I cook myself and using the extra time to socialize with people I choose is worth finding another job if needed.
We just collectively proved the hypothesis that we don’t need to be in an office in order to be productive and that remote work is 20-30% more productive measuring the output of my department.
We have known this for a long time but companies were in denial and pushing strawmen.
But now we know.
So, forcing a much more painful experience and lower quality of life despite it being less profitable is insulting and clearly not about for everyone’s well being.
Office Space couldn’t be written about remote workers. Power tripping managers have a much more difficult time asserting themselves, and might be finding out that they’re not as important as they thought.
I think the rebellion against totalitarian work life has started, and that’s apparently worrisome enough that the productivity gains from remote work aren’t worth it.
The next step is realizing that the “theory of bullshit jobs” is at least partly true, and that modernization has removed the need for as many people to be working as there are. It’s actually resource limitation that prohibits our collective wealth, and not our labor.
For example, we're already seeing spyware being a condition for some remote workers. Whether that continues I don't know, but it shows the point I think.
The problem is that this cuts both ways.
Is society ready for 15% more people being unemployable?
It's been many decades, and we never really "solved" the issues caused by the mills/mines/factories all going under. We simply ignored the people hurt.
I still see no one proposing a solution, 40 years later.
I started working mostly from home in 2015, and entirely from home starting in 2018. I was a little apprehensive, because I'd worked in an office from 2000-2015, and believed all of the "it will make collaborating harder" thinking. I've been sold on WFH ever since. I don't think there's anything wrong with choosing to work from an office if it makes someone happier, but it's not something I'm interested in doing again.
Maybe that is a signal in itself you should find a place where you do enjoy it? We spend so so so much of our time at work, we should strive to make it something we enjoy.
I do like where I work and I do like my coworkers - for remote work.
Please do not twist my words to match your narrative.
To be fair, if my office had this, I'd be a lot more inclined to go in every day.
Some people have a genuine preference for a brutalist cube farm and it's not because their aesthetics barometer is malfunctioning.
Sounds horrible (I have allergies).
Any benefit you get from the office environment you can replicate on your own. I think that what people like the most about working from home is the absolute lack of commuting. I wouldn’t mind working in an office provided that office was no more than a mile away from my home, and I could comfortably walk there. But it’s really difficult to hire all your employees such that they live close to the same office. Conversely, the wider a net you can cast the more likely you are to find the employees that you need.
I see people who like the social aspects of an office. You can get that by socializing with people in your neighborhood. Get together for lunch regularly and you’ll soon have good friends that you won’t lose as soon as you change jobs.
I see that others like to be away from their families for a time, so that they can concentrate. Feel free to have an office space that isn’t directly connected to your home; just keep it in your neighborhood. Where I live there are dozens or hundreds of small offices in the commercial center that are rented out one room at a time. Usually they’re used by local lawyers and insurance agents and such, but there’s no reason you can’t rent one instead.
Everyone should work out exactly what their commute costs them. You can save a lot of money, especially if you can get rid of a car. Are the benefits you’re getting really so unique and irreplaceable that the expense and wasted hours are worth it?
Additionaly, study after study has shown that non-verbal communication between people is an enormous part of effective communication. Argue all you want, too many studies, turn all over the weekend she the same thing. And the I've thing that video conferencing does is cripple that comm channel.
I love my partial remote work schedule, and love that it exists. But I'll never assume it's the "best" way, it that it doesn't have unforseen costs to me and my coworkers
Citations please?
Of course the study with the most impact is Mehrabian's 7-38-55 'rule' (which it isn't!). It's wildly misunderstood, but his study found in any communication scenario 7% of information received is through the words spoken, 38% is through the tone of voice, and 55% is though bodily movements. Regardless of the numbers, it just points out that just because someone 'says' something, people don't believe them unless their body language agrees. If their tone, posture, eye-contact, etc.. are saying something else, people invariably believe the non-verbal regardless of the words said. It's been a while, but IIRC, the other studies never find that low of an impact with spoken word, yet it never exceeds 50% either.
Lastly, the definition of nonverbal communications can vary widely, but I like Henley's (77) (as a starting point) which lists a few areas "... body postures and movements, facial expressions, gestures, touching, eye contact, use of space, and so on".
Hope you find some of that useful.
This is not an insurmountable challenge.
(remote ~10 years)
It's good! Not for everyone, I suppose, and you need to have dedicated space for it.
Let's revisit this after 2 additional interest rate hikes.
We're one pathetic 25bps hike from massive layoffs in the bloated tech sector.
Rebellion? Seriously? The drones are not happy and are not falling in line with what the feudal lords want?
"Is getting serious": like up until now people were casually joking about this until they figured out it's an option to WFH.
We, people, pretend to be the smartest creatures around to continuously do things that are directly against our best interest even when we have evidence to point us in the right way. It's stupid af and preserving a failed way of doing things should not ever be a priority (the focus should be on the transition to something better)